Saving Seafood

Report slams faulty NOAA probe of observer deaths

May 15, 2018 — A review team today released a long-awaited report that criticizes NOAA Fisheries for not doing enough to investigate the unusual deaths of three fisheries observers, saying in one case there had been “an information vacuum.”

While all three observers were lost in the line of duty, the causes of their deaths remain inconclusive, and the agency should have done more with other federal agencies to determine what went wrong, the 545-page report concluded.

“While aware that NOAA Fisheries is not an investigative agency, and that jurisdictional and geographical issues were very complex in two of the three cases, the review team believes that more could have been done in cooperation with other agencies involved to pursue more comprehensive and transparent closure of these tragic incidents,” the report said.

Members of an external review team that conducted the study found during field visits that many observers were not even aware that three of their colleagues had died in a single year.

“It remains troubling that three observers … were lost in the line of duty over the space of a year, yet there has to date been no official closure or systematic analysis of lessons learned with respect to any of them,” the report said.

The observers are assigned to fishing vessels, collecting data and making sure fishermen follow federal rules. NOAA has roughly 900 observers and at-sea monitors, who have college degrees and are professionally trained.

Read the full story at E&E News

 

North Carolina Marine Fisheries Commission To Consider Changes To Shrimp Trawling Industry

May 15, 2018 — The North Carolina Marine Fisheries Commission plans to discuss and possibly vote on new gear requirements in the shrimp trawl fishery at their quarterly business meeting in New Bern on Wednesday and Thursday.

A three-year study identified four new gear configurations that reduce finfish bycatch by at least 40 percent.  The North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries, NOAA Fisheries and N.C. Sea Grant worked with commercial fishermen and local net makers to test 14 different trawl net configurations.

“Each time that we met, they would define what gears to be tested and, you know, as the three-year process went on, we started seeing some devices that showed more promise and we started focusing our efforts on those type of devices.”

Kevin Brown, gear development biologist with the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries says nearly 314,000 pounds of fish and shrimp were sampled during the study.

Read the full story at WTEB

 

Senate Should Confirm Barry Myers to Lead NOAA

May 14, 2018 — NOAA – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – needs its leader! President Trump nominated Barry Lee Myers, the CEO of AccuWeather, to the post in mid-October. The Senate Commerce Committee has twice advanced Myers’ nomination to the full Senate. All that’s needed to fill this important job is a majority vote on the Senate floor, which both Democrats and Republicans expect to happen. Unfortunately, partisan politics keeps getting in the way, delaying the vote.

Why is moving this along important? The Atlantic Ocean’s hurricane season begins June 1; tornado season has already started. In the first few days of May alone, 18 tornadoes were reported in Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma. In addition, 117 severe storms ravaged the Plains. The experienced professionals at NOAA can deal with the daily challenges of severe weather. But bigger decisions to carry out congressionally mandated improvements in hurricane and tornado forecasting require the authority of a Senate-confirmed nominee. As does putting a new hurricane-hunter plane into operation and prioritizing seasonal forecasts for farmers and ranchers. The nation also has a huge seafood trade imbalance that needs the attention of top NOAA leadership.

Few people are as qualified to head NOAA as Barry Myers. He has successfully headed a large, complex, science-based organization that is one of the country’s – and the world’s – leading creators and distributors of weather forecasts, data and scientific information. In other words, Myers is a veteran executive in the areas in which NOAA operates.

Myers also has worked for more than 30 years to make NOAA a better, stronger and more transparent organization. He helped establish the American Weather Enterprise, which combines the resources of NOAA, academic and research institutions, and America’s private-sector weather companies. The federal government works with industry leaders including Myers to distribute weather data free of charge to the American people. In fact, Myers has been repeatedly honored for helping to bring to the nation these major advancements, making the U.S. the envy of the world in how it provides weather information to its citizens.

Senate offices have received more than 60 letters from individuals and organizations supporting his confirmation, including strong backing from the past four leaders of the U. S. National Weather Service who served under both Democratic and Republican administrations. In addition, the seafood industry has overwhelmingly advocated his confirmation with letters of support from seafood processors and others in the fisheries industry ranging from ship captains to sport fishermen.

Members of Saving Seafood’s National Coalition for Fishing Communities consider Myers’ experience at the helm of a family-based business to be a special asset for his role at NOAA. They recognize this connection as a skill set no other leader of NOAA has had. Many American seafood-harvesting and processing companies are multi-generational, family-based businesses and his understanding of them is unique. While individuals with impressive scientific credentials have led NOAA in the past, the coalition believes Myers brings to the agency much-needed leadership, vision and managerial skills.

Read the full op-ed at Real Clear Politics

New Bedford Standard-Times: groundfishermen need to get back to work

May 14, 2018 — It was a bittersweet start to the fishing season on May 1.

Bittersweet because much of New Bedford’s already battered groundfish fleet could not go to sea.

Nearly 60 permits in Sectors VII and IX did not receive quota allocations from NOAA. The federal government withheld their quota because of overages accumulated by fleet owner Carlos Rafael when he admitted last year that he had falsified the numbers of fish he had taken, substituting valuable species subject to quotas for ones that were not so.

Rafael is in prison now but the results of his misdeeds continue to be paid by the community that made him rich. About 80 fishermen have been out of work since November when NOAA first instituted its groundfish ban for the sector in which Rafael perpetuated his fraud. Shoreside businesses, including the ones that manufacture nets and ice and repair boats, have also been greatly affected by the cut to New Bedford’s groundfish effort.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

 

Massachusetts: Federal delegation ‘solidly behind’ New Bedford in fishing fight

May 14, 2018 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Prior to a town hall-style meeting in New Bedford on Saturday, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren quietly gathered with fellow senator Ed Markey and Congressman William Keating in the Wharfinger Building on Pier 3. Inside, the three legislators sat for more than an hour, listening to representatives of the fishing community relay their present and future concerns facing the industry.

About 80 fishermen out of New Bedford have been unable to fish or lease their quotas since NOAA shut down Sector IX in November. The shutdown remains in effect until the feds can estimate how much quota convicted “Codfather” Carlos Rafael depleted in his overfishing scheme.

Massachusetts’ two senators have been all but crucified for what many see as inaction on the Sector IX closure. Following Saturday’s meeting, Senator Warren told WBSM News what appears to some as inaction is, in fact, a more tactful approach in discussions with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“There are a lot of steps to go through to get Sector IX back up,” said Warren. “And NOAA seems committed to move forward on those. Senator Markey and I are pushing. We don’t want to turn this into politics. We want to facilitate this. We want to make it move forward.”

“But we have made it very clear that both of us and Congressman Keating are deeply committed to getting a fast process so that the innocent people that have been harmed by what’s happened here can get back out on the water and fish,” she said.

Read the full story at WBSM

 

Blockchain could open markets

May 11, 2018 — Consumers are demanding transparency regarding their food. One survey of 1,522 consumers found that as they have become accustomed to getting more information via their phones, their demand for transparency as to all types of products — from medicine to sports to food — has increased. Consumers are not alone. Changes to laws governing supply chain transparency and documentation have imposed considerable obligations on companies to not only know their supplier, but to know their supplier’s supplier, and so forth.

The Obama-era Action Plan for combatting IUU fishing and seafood fraud requires the development of a program to track fishery products along the supply chain. Beginning January 1, 2018, NOAA rolled out its Seafood Import Monitoring Program, which establishes reporting and recordkeeping requirements for fish importers. For 10 groups of species — including cod, red snapper, and tunas — it requires importers provide and report certain records along the entire chain of custody, from harvest to entry into the United States. Information will be entered into the confidential International Trade Data System — not reported to the public or on a label. NOAA has also proposed a voluntary Commerce Trusted Trader Program, which would qualify importers to achieve streamlined entry requirements under the monitoring program. These programs are expected to be expanded to cover all imported fish products in coming years.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

Boston advocacy group sues NMFS twice

May 11, 2018 — The Conservation Law Foundation, a Boston, Massachusetts-based environmental advocacy group, filed two law lawsuits this week against the US’ top fishing regulatory agency over environmental concerns, Courthouse News reports.

In one lawsuit, filed against the US National Marine Fisheries Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric assistant administrator Chris Oliver and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, the group says the partial passage, on April 9, of  New England’s Omnibus Essential Fish Habitat Amendment failed to meet some of its initial goals, like minimizing the impact of fishing gear on fish habitats.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

 

Mother of cod: We’re fishing exactly the wrong fish, scientists warn

May 11, 2018 — The bigger a female fish grows, the more eggs she lays — disproportionately so.

That’s the conclusion driven home in a report published Thursday in the journal Science. Biologists at Monash University in Australia and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama gathered egg data from 342 fish species across the world’s oceans.

At the extreme end, the vermilion snapper, Rhomboplites aurorubens, had a 400-fold difference in eggs between the littlest and biggest mama fish. A small female snapper lays around 4,000 eggs. A whopper of a vermilion snapper can deposit eggs by the million, study authors Diego Barneche and Dustin Marshall, colleagues at Monash University, told The Washington Post.

This research won’t come as a surprise to any field biologists who work with fish. Mark Wuenschel, who works at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center and was not a part of this study, said the size effect was so well known it has an acronym among researchers: BOFFFF, for Big Old Fat Fecund Female Fish. But this work is valuable because a BOFFFF’s importance is often tough to assess, Wuenschel said — because these fish are fished out of the population.

Read the full story at the Washington Post

Hawaii swordfish industry shut down to protect endangered turtles

May 11, 2018 — A federal court order to protect endangered loggerhead sea turtles has forced the National Marine Fisheries Service to immediately close the shallow-set longline fishery in Hawaii for the rest of the year.

A 2012 lawsuit filed by the Turtle Island Restoration Network and the Center for Biological Diversity, represented by the nonprofit law firm Earthjustice, was rejected in a Hawaii district court but they eventually won a split decision on appeal in December.

The parties reached an agreement Friday to settle the case. It included an immediate shutdown of the shallow-set longline fishery, which targets swordfish. NMFS implemented the closure Thursday.   

“The National Marine Fisheries Service, which is supposed to be protecting our wildlife, has instead been illegally helping the longliners push sea turtles to the brink of extinction,” Earthjustice attorney Paul Achitoff said in a news release.

Read the full story at the Honolulu Civil Beat

 

The Future of Fishing Is Big Data and Artificial Intelligence

May 10, 2018 — New England’s groundfish season is in full swing, as hundreds of dayboat fishermen from Rhode Island to Maine take to the water in search of the region’s iconic cod and haddock. But this year, several dozen of them are hauling in their catch under the watchful eye of video cameras as part of a new effort to use technology to better sustain the area’s fisheries and the communities that depend on them.

Video observation on fishing boats—electronic monitoring—is picking up steam in the Northeast and nationally as a cost-effective means to ensure that fishing vessels aren’t catching more fish than allowed while informing local fisheries management. While several issues remain to be solved before the technology can be widely deployed—such as the costs of reviewing and storing data—electronic monitoring is beginning to deliver on its potential to lower fishermen’s costs, provide scientists with better data, restore trust where it’s broken, and ultimately help consumers gain a greater understanding of where their seafood is coming from.

“Electronic monitoring is a tremendous tool,” says Brett Alger, national electronics technology coordinator for NOAA Fisheries. “It isn’t necessarily for everyone or every fishery,” but “we’re working collaboratively in all of our regions with fishermen on the ground to understand their needs. I expect it to grow.”

The technology is required for highly migratory longline species in the Atlantic (swordfish). It’s thriving in the Pacific coast groundfish industry, and dozens of other fisheries regions have pilot initiatives.

Read the full story at Civil Eats